Paths of Glory eBook

“Besides, this town and all the towns between
here and Brussels are being secretly flooded with
papers printed in French telling the people that we
have been beaten everywhere to the south, and that
the Allies are but a few miles away; and that if they
will rise in numbers and destroy the garrisons re-enforcements
will arrive the next morning to hold the district
against us.

“If they do rise it will be Louvain all over
again. We shall burn Liege and kill all who
are suspected of being in league against our troops.
Assuredly many innocent ones will suffer then with
the guilty; but what else can we do? We are living
above a seething volcano.”

Certainly, though, never did volcano seethe more quietly.

The garrison commander would not hear of our visiting
any of the wrecked Belgian fortresses on the wooded
heights behind the city. As a reason for his
refusal he said that explosives in the buried magazines
were beginning to go off, making it highly dangerous
for spectators to venture near them. However,
he had no objection to our going to a certain specified
point within the zone of supposed safety. With
a noncommissioned officer to guide us we climbed up
a miry footpath to the crest of a low hill; and from
a distance of perhaps a hundred yards we looked across
at what was left of Fort Loncin, one of the principal
defenses.

I am wrong there. We did not look at what was
left of Fort Loncin. Literally nothing was left
of it. As a fort it was gone, obliterated, wiped
out, vanished. It had been of a triangular shape.
It was of no shape now. We found it difficult
to believe that the work of human hands had wrought
destruction so utter and overwhelming. Where
masonry walls had been was a vast junk heap; where
stout magazines had been bedded down in hard concrete
was a crater; where strong barracks had stood was
a jumbled, shuffled nothingness.

Standing there on the shell-torn hilltop, looking
across to where the Krupp surprise wrote its own testimonials
at its first time of using, in characters so deadly
and devastating, I found myself somehow thinking of
that foolish nursery tale wherein it is recited that
a pig built himself a house of straw, and the wolf
came; and he huffed and he puffed and he blew the
house down. The noncommissioned officer told
us an unknown number of the defenders, running probably
into the hundreds, had been buried so deeply beneath
the ruins of the fort in the last hours of the fighting
that the Germans had been unable to recover the bodies.
Even as he spoke a puff of wind brought to our nostrils
a smell which, once a man gets it into his nose, he
will never get the memory of it out again so long
as he has a nose. Being sufficiently sick, we
departed thence.